My 8800GT got fried indeed (I had the 196.75 driver installed)... The computer froze while I was playing and I never thought that it will be the end of card. I did a hard reset an this is what I found:

After trying everything: drivers, system restore, testing the card on 2 other computers with the same result, video bios flash... I was going to throw the card away and getting a new one (Probably an HD 4890).

But I found out through forums of a last hope: BAKING THE CARD. Yes, that, baking the card for 10 min. in the oven, let it cool, reasambled it.

However I'm having some issues with high demanding games that I usually played whithout any trouble... This is the end of my relationship with any nVidia hardware, I'll never buy any device from them. I wasn't a fanboy, I never liked to be one, I pick my hardware researching to try to know what is the best for my everytime, and I don't mind going from ATI to NVIDIA. I've used them both, but this one is the last one to the green ones... They've forced me to become an ATI fanboy. What they did releasing this "whql" driver is a hughe irresponsability, non acceptable at all.

I'm not a MS fanboy, but MS has nothing to do.
1.WHQL certification verifies the driver related to the Windows OS. It does not care that the driver spins the fans 100% all the time (hint: noise) or keeps then at 0.
2.I really don't think the tests are done in a computer case. I think they are open tesbenches, and maybe even controlled enviroment (25C?). Why would MS bother to test the HW, when it's interested in Windows-driver interactions. So I don't think a GTX could fail the test even after throttling.
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On both sides, they program the fans to stay low to appear more quiet out of the box and in reviewer testing. Put a poll up and I think we'd find most serious 3d/compute users have already learned manual fan speed is preferred and often required.

How can you "spin" a melted, 500$+ 295GTX? Class action lawsuit anyone??? This is not a question of fanboyisim anymore. We are beyond that now. I've owned many great Nvidia cards myself in the last 15 years, but enough is enough.

The renaming of the renaming of the renaming of renaming suck. Fermi "puppy" wood screw launch suck. In fact Fermi suck, period. And it's not even out yet... Jen-Hsun Huang suck. Nvidia PR spin after spin after lies after deception suck. Over all, Nvidia attitude suck. And now, their driver suck major balls too.

If you still have share in this company that is a mere shadow of its former self, I would sell them RIGHT NOW, before it's too late. I mean, a catastrophe of this magnitude, just 3 weeks before lunching an overdue and already doomed product? It's enough to wonder if Nvidia is not suicidal... Reply

There was a bug in the drivers that nVidia pulled once they started getting reports. I'm also quite sure that if cards were fried because of the driver update that nVidia would help out with that. Hardly grounds for a lawsuit - let alone one with class-action status. Reply

Really? Is that what Nvidia have done with thousands... maybe tens of thousands... of Nvidia cards on notebook/laptop motherboards? (NO). They agreed to pay money, but not to those who suffer from their mistakes. No, they pay fines to the MANUFACTURERS (Hewlett Packard), who then turn around and charge $399 to fix the laptop with the bogus Nvidia chip.

Nvidia is LESS than honorable when it comes to making good on their mistakes. Reply

Dunno :D Perhaps they have a problem with the temperatures on the new series, for which the 196.75 drivers include support (if they do). Maybe they want us to (I'm a fanboy too) think the new series won't make much noise, that it will be very low audible at idle/2D, which has made the driver-fan-controller set the fan speed / voltage too low for the fans to start up at all... Reply

Yeah except the drivers don't run the same exact code for all their cards. That includes things like fan control. So basically its a nasty bug, and nothing more. What causes the bug to crop up is the big question. The only person I know that was having major overheating problems with this driver (196.75) was someone that used a modified BIOS to overclock and override fan control.

Funny enough, the 196.21 WHQL drivers are what pushed them to do this, since they fixed lots of issues but they also disabled software overclocking. Lots of Nvidia driver issues lately, especially for WHQL releases, which are typically very solid. Reply

1. It's my understanding this messed up the AUTO fan setting functionality. I would guess if this had to happen, it will effect a smaller amount of people because the group that grabs a new driver as soon as it's launched is also the least likely to keep the fan on auto.

2. nVIDIA PR now needs to STFU with the slandering in every possible place about AMD's grey-screen issues. A grey screen causes a reboot, a fried card causes an RMA, unless it's no longer under warranty, in which the customer is SOL. Which is a more gigantic fail?

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